A Tribute To The Cookin 'n' Cleanin Feminists

A friend of mine said that Virginia Woolf would grimace at what Kenyan women have reduced feminism to, that is, equality in the cooking and cleaning duty roster at home. The likes of Virginia Woolf and Ethel Smyth fought for economic, social and political equality that we women enjoy today and we shall forever be grateful. I, however, have been thinking about this new craze about- apparently its the fourth wave of- feminism. Yes, women can now vote, inherit property, become political leaders and hold the same jobs a man can. But are men and women truly equal? If they are, what are these fourth wave feminists fighting for or against?

In my opinion the fourth wave feminists are fighting against mindsets and culture. There are laws set up to alleviate the position of women yet they are not abided to, primarily because as a society, we are still stuck on the ideals that a man and woman cannot be placed on the same level economically and socially. Although women are being empowered, many of them are still urged to make themselves smaller or lesser than the men in their lives lest they bruise the egos of these men. Personally, as a 20 year old still trying to figure out what it means to be a woman, I know I have experienced this. I have worn false humility (or is it modesty?) so that I don't come out as too smart or too aggressive or so that I don't come off as an 'ajua' as my friends would say. Maybe what this fourth generation feminists are fighting for is a mentality in society in which every individual views men and women as having the same capabilities and being able to achieve the same things. Maybe they are fighting for people to view every individual as a human being first than at their gender. In this way, there will be true equality.

However, people may argue that men and women were created differently. Their wiring and structure definitely is different and therefore, may not be able to perform the same tasks with the same level of skill. This is true; men were designed to be more muscular than women; women were designed to be birthers; and how men think is completely different from the way women think. They even have a couple of different hormones, men and women. But I don't believe that the varied wiring and plumbing of women from men affects their ability to become great leaders, politicians, CEOs, inventors and every other job that has been traditionally left for men. I also don't think that because it is believed men have a tough time expressing emotions that they can't be great care givers.

The Kenyan feminists must also believe that men can be great care givers. Why would they fight so much for equal sharing of household chores? I don't understand why this shouldn't be a feminist fight. For our children to view men and women as equals, shouldn't they see their parents treating each other so? This means that the way spouses speak to and treat each other is important. Also, it is important to practically show children that no job is too small or big for them, by both parents taking part in household chores. Studies show that a child's worldview is formed in the first five years of their existence. Therefore, whatever is implied through the actions and words of a child's first caregivers is vital in teaching about gender roles and role allocation in society.

My friend is tired of all the Kenyan feminists out there. The more I think of feminism, the more I am convinced that there is a place for these women who have been silenced in ways different from the times of the first generation of feminists. So I guess this is for these feminists, fighting for social equality, fighting in your homes, at the office or wherever. We need more of you. Keep on.

Ebook Review: The Other Experiment

I have never written a review before so this will definitely not be a traditional review. But I really need to tell you about this ebook! First because I know the guy who wrote it and he's been asking (read begging) me to write about it so that he can become a slightly richer guy. And then, because you have to read this ebook.

Why? Because this book is about you. I know the author of the ebook may not know you or the story of your life. But he is human and he may know a thing or two about humanity that you can definitely relate to.  The reason that I believe that this novel is for you is at one point in your life you must felt left out, alienated from a group of people, be it because of your colour, gender, name, freakish tendencies or just because this group decided it didn't like you. So at one point in your life you have felt or been the other, an anomaly in a people or a group of people. And I believe this is what Ras Mengesha seeks to examine in his ebook. He says that The Other Experiment is an experimental "novel" that uses mixed media to "interrogate otherness" in our society. 

I believe at one point or another we have felt like the other in our society or we know someone who has been ostracized for being different. So we can all somehow relate to the contents of this ebook. Then again, we can question our society and our personal prejudices against the Other. And hopefully we can seek ways to change what we don't like to see in our society. We can stop being silent about the atrocities that take place to the Other. The Other Experiment, has the power to change how we see our world and motivate us to make it a better place. 

So I would definitely advice to get a copy of this ebook. It's very affordable, just 200 shillings! Trust me, it will be the best 200 bob you will spend this month. 

If interested in buying the ebook and/or reading Ras Mengesha's work, check out Ras Mengesha's blog: https://rasmengesha.wordpress.com/ and for the ebook: https://rasmengesha.wordpress.com/the-other-experiment-3/

Enjoy!

Romans 8

You say that nothing can keep me from your love

But today as I

Spat on Harold’s ugly pimply face

Stole mother’s cakes and put on a chase

Sat on Tom to have life at my pace

I could not feel any further from your love.

You say that you see beyond sin

To a God who became man, who

Trotted the dusty, worldly streets

And slept in many a barn.

He who washed his follower’s feet

And preached salvation at every feast

So that you could call me son

You say that when this God-like Man

Hang himself on a tree

He rescued me

That when he declared, ‘It is finished!’

Indeed, it was finished.

And I, slave of the do’s and don’ts

Of the society

I, carrier of the yoke of shame and guilt,

Of frustration and betrayal,

Of the past, present and future,

I am free.

Yes, nothing can keep me from you,

Neither angels nor demons,

Neither the past nor the future,

Neither death nor life,

Nothing in all creation

Can separate us from the love

That is in Christ Jesus.

Love, Religion and Confusion

About a month ago my sister asked me whether I would date a man who didn't share the same religious beliefs as I did even if they had the same core values. I was completely certain that I couldn't. I argued that he couldn't have the same core values as I did if he wasn't a Christian. My sister was disappointed. My family has boasted to being the most open-minded family in Nairobi county, with the traveling and what-not, so this notion of mine seemed conservative and ridiculous. I just thought she couldn't get it because she doesn't subscribe to any religion.

Then I read The Obscure Logic Of The Heart. It's a story about a girl's struggle to reconcile her religious beliefs with her love for a man who doesn't share similar beliefs. I was taken on a journey where the couple had to make so many sacrifices and compromises in order to be together. The girl had to lie to her parents and was almost disowned by them, the guy had to tolerate the girl's indecisiveness. What mostly caught my attention was how the girl had to reconcile her beliefs (what her God thought of unbelievers- she was Muslim by the way) and her love for the 'heathen'. In a lot of ways she went against some of her principles, which I found a bit sad.

As I read the book I could help but ask whether I'd date boyfriend were he not a Christian. This was a tough question to answer after I put into perspective the depth of my feelings for him. I really do care about boyfriend and he is an great guy. But is it the religion that has made him who he is? Is it religion that has attracted me to boyfriend? I cannot say that it is religion that has fully attracted him to be. If that was the case, I would be attracted to many Christian boys. But there is an extent as to his love for God that has made me like him. I don't think I'll ever know. I will have to be in that situation to understand it. 

Anyway, I do love how the book ends:

Every conquest, loss or rejection leaves its trace. We love according to what the heart has been taught. We love in the shadow- sometimes benign, sometimes malevolent- of every disappointment, betrayal or fulfillment. We love- and no god can control the feeling or mitigate the consequences.

I guess the one thing that cuts across all of humanity is love. After objectively reading what I've just typed, it does make me squirm a but primarily because I believe that God is love and there is no way God would be against anyone loving another. That has been His mission since He created the world. And Paul in Romans 8:38-39 says it wonderfully:

38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Nothing To Call Our Own

At thirty seven we didn't have much.

Not even a baby was under our name.

Nyayo!

Njeri holds him. He sobs and cries out in pain like his limbs are being torn off his body, one by one. She holds him as he weeps in regret, as he shouts.  If there was sackcloth and ash nearby, she thinks, he would have worn it. He always was dramatic.

Nyayo! he had always said with a sort of manic passion; his fist hitting the table with force. Then he'd laugh uncontrollably. She had never understood why he had such a passion for that word. Maybe it reminded him of his father. Maybe he had gotten tired of hearing the children at school say it so many times, like it was their second name. But there had always been a strange fire in his eyes when he said nyayo. And Njeri had thought, hoped, that he'd join the Mwakenya group that she had heard Karanja had joined. They were her salvation, her only way to freedom.

She strokes his head, comforts him, and soothes him. She tries to tell him that it wasn't his fault, that all will be well. She tries to bring herself to say that they could escape to Tanzania, like all other exiles. But she can't. She holds him with her head turned away, holding back the bitterness and disgust that is ripping up a storm within her, that rocks them back and forth. All she wants is to turn off the broken record that is his voice, repeating the one word she couldn't stand him say: sorry.

Njeri looks at the man crying on her lap, streams of tears and mucus fall from his face to her once clean white dress. She wants to spit on his face. She wants to move him away and tell him to quit dirtying her dress, just as he has dirtied the nation. She wants to call him what he truly is: a monster. The grinch of independent Kenya! He was no longer her husband or the father of her children. He stopped being human the moment he confessed to being a torturer. He stopped being human when he became a murderer.

She never understood why he came home so late. Surely a headteacher at a primary school did not have so much work On many nights he would arrive and dash to the bathroom. Njeri would hear him retching his bowels out. He used to say that he was making room for Njeri's good cooking. At times she'd laugh, delighted that he loved her cooking. Other times she'd consider spiking his food with deworming medicine. Right now, as he sobbed uncontrollably, she thought that maybe it wasn't the cries of mourners that were the sound of death; maybe it was retching.

She had promised never to leave him. He had promised to follow in the footsteps of God and his father. Those had been their vows. Like Moses breaking the stone tablet, Njeri realised that they were breaking their vows, him holding one side of the stone and she the other. All because he has chosen to follow a different kind of nyayo.

Submission

He was always told that it was not in the beating of a woman that made her subservient; it was in the manipulation. Manipulation came in many forms, one just had to know which made a particular woman bend over backwards for you. He had chosen love- affirmation might be a better word- as his strategy.

And it worked. 

Christian

Dear Judgemental Freaks who don't think they're judgemental freaks just because they are 'open minded',

Christianity does not make me perfect. It is not some magic wand that instantly transforms me into the 'ideal Christian' you hear I should be.

It is patience. God holding my hand, gradually steering and moulding me into what He wants me to be.

I will make my fair share of mistakes. Please do not judge God by my flaws. He is everything but imperfect and evil.

God is neither male nor female. He is a being. God is good. He is Love. He is so much more than we can fathom.

I wish we could focus on this God.

PS I am sorry for calling you a judgemental freak. I feel bad about it now.

Yes, I will say it over and over again before I agree with anything you say. Or admit to your being right. Because, like you have said may times before, I have commitment issues. Answering in the affirmative is committing to doing as asked and saying whatever is needed and being whatever is demanded. It might also be losing to you.

It is also opening up. It is in a sense vulnerability.

Feminist

The word 'beautiful' quickly turns to 'crazy' every time I talk about feminism. I am crazy for being something that he christened me to be. I don't want to be a feminist. I know not what it truly means.

I want to be woman.

Imperfections

I want to let you hold me and run your node-y hands across my body.
But I am afraid that I will fart.

Stealing Kisses

I have been stealing kisses. Sometimes it's on the hands or the wrists or on the neck. I can't help it. It is like there is a little demon that has created a magnetic pull between his body and my lips, and I am drawn to him. Mama says that feelings like those are sinful and kisses are even more sinful. So I have started praying about it, asking God to take away this evil feelings from me. I have been fasting, pleading God to forgive me for stealing those kisses.

But.

The attraction is too strong. I find myself quickly placing my lips over whichever part of his body is closest and swiftly- sometimes slowly and grudgingly- parting with him. I make sure though to avoid his lips because Mama says that that is how girls get babies. I don't want a baby. Mama would beat me and then call Auntie Grace to come and take me for a few days. Auntie Grace knows a pastor, a worker of miracles, who can remove babies that are got outside wedlock. Mama says babies got out of wedlock aren't a blessing but bring shame to the family and lots of curses. And do you know how much praying and fasting one has to do to be freed from curses? A lot thus I'd rather not kiss and make babies. So I try to refrain from even looking at his beautiful lips because Mama's anger is not hard to ignite like a jet fuel near a spark.

And when I get carried away and imagine me kissing his lips, the image is quickly replaced by Mama's anger and then God's wrath, which Mama says is ten thousand times worse than hers. It might be more. When I think about God watching me do a sinful thing like kiss, I want to cry and plead for mercy. But I know He is a Judge and quite the disciplinarian because Mama says she got her strictness from God Himself.

I am also terrified because I know any minute now, God will tell Mama that I have been stealing kisses.  She says that her spiritual gift is the gift of knowledge and she can see through the hearts of men. He will not be pleased because like a believer confessing to a priest, he will think that I finally confessed to Mama about him and my thieving ways.

Glimpse Of Hope

She stared at him,
Eyes squinted,
Lids moving up, down, up, down

Up,
To his self locked dreads
Face frowning fiercely
As she struggled to swallow
Bile and words stuck on her throat.

Down,
To the bands that crowded his hands
Probably hiding tattoos
And scars from brawls
She sneers
Holding her mouth tightly
Pushing sounds and syllables of mistrust
To the back of her mouth
Down her throat
Back into her mind

Eyes squinted
Eyebrows raised
She stares back at eyes
Willing her to smile
Begging for some form of approval

Hoping for a glimpse of hope.

Surveys And Natural Kinks

I think there was something wrong with my lecturer the other day. It seemed like he didn't feel like teaching. Why else would he speak in a dwindling monotone and expect us to listen and write notes? After an hour of suffering i.e straining to listen to my lecturer and write notes, I sort of gave up. I put the lecturer's voice at the back of my mind and started doing what I'd like to call a mini-survey.

I decided to look at people's hair, specifically girls. I wanted to get ideas on what not to do on my hair, me being an anti-mainstream junky. After lots of research and putting together the numbers, I found that  most, if not all, girls in the class had;

a) extremely straight hair, whether natural or relaxed

b) weaves that were extremely straights and uncharacteristically long

c) plaited braids that were extremely straight or close to straight

I also found out that I was part of the statistic. I fall under category a). What I didn't see was a bush of some serious African hair or a girl with short natural hair. This made me a bit sad. Here is a group of students at the university, where diversity is embraced, and we all had pretty much the same thing: straight hair!

Weren't we proud of our God-given natural kinks? Yes, they are hard to maintain. Yes, it is painful to comb what feels like a steel wool clone. Yes, it breaks easily. But why sew hair that looks like Barbie's on your head when you could learn to take care of  and maintain the most versatile type of hair?

I think I'm venting without making a point. What I'm trying to say is that we need to be proud of our natural tresses. We've fed our minds to believe that straight hair like the white folks is the best. What a bunch of hogwash! I'm sure God didn't make a mistake when He made Africans have some seriously kinky hair. And I know that there's a whole natural hair movement going on now in Nairobi but it skipped my school. So I think it's time we embraced our natural hair- it's beautiful, a heck of a lot of work and expensive but worth it.

I miss my natural hair. I might shave off the perm this year.

New Year And Cakes

Hi Guys!

I'm sorry I haven't blogged for such a long time. Apart from sucking at using technology, I've been busy trying to survive university, then when my school decided to close indefinitely, I was busy making my very first black forest cake. Yup! I made a black forest cake from scratch. Yes, it had whipped cream and cherries and it was dark! It was the best first black forest cake ever made! It was so good that my mum made me make the cake for Christmas. Okay, I forced her to buy me things so I could bake a black forest for Christmas. And everyone loved it! (PS My hand is up right now waiting for someone to high five it. As Barnie Stinson would say, Up top!)

Proof for all you doubters!

I didn't know how excited I was about baking until I found out I love cakes and pastries. I mean that I enjoy eating cake. My problem was I was- and still am- too broke most of the times to regularly enjoy a good piece of cake, because cake that is made well is a bit pricey in Nairobi. So I decided about a year or two ago to start baking so that I could feed my hunger for cakes and bakes. My first cake was a marble cake and since that first bake, I haven't stopped whipping things up.

I really do feel like I'm not making a lot of sense so I'll just say one more thing about baking then I'll leave. Baking to me is therapy. I'm not into group activities so I like that baking gives me alone time and I get to think about life and other dumb things I can say on this blog. I like that baking has steps and it can give me the assurance that sometimes structure does work. It makes me confident that at least I am good at one thing. 

The truth is, this post wasn't supposed to be about my cake or my love for baking. But I liked it so I went with the flow. The outcome was about 300 words of gibberish that I hope someone out there will appreciate.

I actually wrote to wish you guys a happy new year. I know, I'm like 3 days late but it's the thought that counts. I hope that you'll spend this year with the people you love and doing what you love, because that's all that matters.

Also as a new year's resolution, I think I'll bake more and maybe by the end of the year you'll be buying my cakes!

A happy new year to all of you. I hope you'll keep reading my blog. Oh, thank you for reading my blog in 2013. I am honoured to have readers on this blog. Happy and blessed 2014!